Comment by jballanc
3 days ago
Reporting blatant criminal violations is not the same thing as moderating otherwise-protected speech that could be construed as misleading, offensive, or objectionable in some other way.
3 days ago
Reporting blatant criminal violations is not the same thing as moderating otherwise-protected speech that could be construed as misleading, offensive, or objectionable in some other way.
Indeed. However, there is no universal definition for what offends people, and never will be. People are individuals who form their own opinions and those opinions are diverse.
Ergo if you start to moderate speech which is offensive from one point of view, it will inevitably be inoffensive to others, and you've now established that you're a publisher, not a platform, because you're making opinionated decisions about which content to publish and to whom. At that point the remedy lies in reclassifying said platform as a publisher, and revisiting how we regulate publishers.
They can be publishers. They can censor material they object to. That's fine. But they don't need special exemptions from the rules other publishers follow.
I think it's good to have publishers in the world who are opinionated. There are opinions I don't like and don't want to see very often. Where we get into trouble is when these publishers get classified as platforms by the law, claim to be politically neutral entities, and enjoy the various legal privileges assigned to platforms by Section 230 of the CDA. The purpose of that section was to encourage a nascent tech industry by assigning special privileges to the companies in it. That purpose is now obsolete, those companies are now behaving like publishers, and reform of our laws is necessary.